One of the more popular reasons for explaining why business spent the last few years sitting on $1.9 trillion of cash was ‘uncertainty.’ Now that Barack Obama has won re-election and the balance of power in the House and Senate remains the same as yesterday, is the ‘uncertainty’ over?

Before getting into that, it’s worth pointing out that the biggest winners and losers in this election were those who made predictions on its outcome. In theory, accurate predictions exist to minimize uncertainty. For example, if someone is known to be good at predicting outcomes, then investors ought to be able to use those predictions to set odds and bet accordingly.

The winner in this prediction sweepstakes was clearly the Republican punching bag, Nate Silver of the FiverThirtyEight blog. Mr. Silver’s pre-election prediction gave Mr. Obama a 92 percent probability of re-election and forecast he’d win 313 electoral votes to Mr. Romney’s 225. The actual result is not in yet since Florida has yet to be called. But as of this writing, Mr. Silver was awfully close — Mr. Obama has 303 electoral votes to Mr. Romney’s 206.

Meanwhile, the biggest loser is Karl Rove. Mr. Rove confidently predicted that Romney would win the popular vote by as much as 2.5 percent and get around 280 electoral votes. In fact, he was high by 4.5 percentage points — Mr. Obama won 50 percent of the popular vote to Romney’s 48 percent — on the popular vote and about 74 electoral ones.

But Mr. Rove is the biggest loser because of his American Crossroads SuperPAC that spent $105 million on advertisements attacking Obama and Massachusetts’ Senator-elect, Elizabeth Warren, among others. Based on his role in deciding on messages, media, and targeted voters, those who were hoping for a different result may question whether he is the right person to be allocating all that money.

The point of comparing predictions to outcomes is that it helps people decide which predictions do a better job of reducing uncertainty. Predictions also serve another purpose that makes people feel better in the short-run — it reinforces their pre-conceived biases about the outcome. Those who wanted Mr. Obama to win, latched on to polls that predicted he would, and vice versa.

This leads me to try to answer the question of whether the clear outcome of the election will reduce uncertainty. In order to address that, though, we need a definition of uncertainty. And those who cited uncertainty as the reason for not investing, claimed that they were holding back because they did not know what would happen to taxes, business regulation, the deficit, the budget and the economy.

However, I think this is not the entire definition. When people talked about uncertainty, what they really meant was that if business held back from investing, it would impede the recovery in the economy. And a slower growing economy boosted the odds of achieving Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s goal of making Obama a one-term president.

To answer the question of whether uncertainty is over, we must relieve the uncertainty over its definition. If uncertainty means a Republican White House and Congress, the uncertainty is over — at least for the next four years. If uncertainty means resolving issues of taxes, business regulation, the deficit, the budget and the economy, nothing much has changed.

Between these definitions of uncertainty lies the question of why businesses actually invest. The answer — based on my interviews with CEOs of small businesses – is that cutting taxes has nothing to do with it. Rather, businesses invest and hire employees because not doing so would cause them to miss a chance to increase their profits.

And in the course of interviewing over 180 start-up CEOs for my new book, "Hungry Start-up Strategy," I have found many that have been growing at over 50 percent a year because they are making a product that creates much greater bang for the buck than competitors’.

In short, with the exception of companies that get most of their revenues from government spending, the decision of whether to invest should not be in the hands of politicians or SuperPACs, it should rest on whether CEOs can spur their companies to create profitable growth opportunities by building products that deliver better value to customers.

If they can do that, then the $1.9 trillion sitting on corporate balance sheets will be invested. If not, then boards should replace them with leaders who will.

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